These days, teach­ing meth­ods are a little bit more ad­vanced. Take this free, new stun­ning visu­al­iz­a­tion tool from re­search­ers at the Uni­versity of Wash­ing­ton’s Cen­ter for Amer­ic­an Polit­ics and Pub­lic Policy, which uses big data to show dec­ades of the law­mak­ing pro­cess in ac­tion.

The tool, called Le­gis­lat­ive Ex­plorer, al­lows users to track the le­gis­lat­ive move­ments of more than 250,000 con­gres­sion­al bills and res­ol­u­tions in­tro­duced from 1973 to the present.

“Any­one can use Le­gis­lat­ive Ex­plorer to ob­serve large scale pat­terns and trends in con­gres­sion­al law­mak­ing without ad­vanced meth­od­o­lo­gic­al train­ing,” the web­site ex­plains. “In ad­di­tion, any­one can dive deep­er in­to the data to fur­ther ex­plore a pat­tern they’ve de­tec­ted, to learn about the activ­it­ies of an in­di­vidu­al law­maker, or to fol­low the pro­gress of a spe­cif­ic bill.”

And, boy, is there a lot of data. Users can sift through it with a vari­ety of fil­ters: a spe­cif­ic Con­gress, sen­at­or, or rep­res­ent­at­ive, polit­ic­al party, top­ic, com­mit­tee, spon­sor, and more. You can also search for a bill by name and see where it died — or when it reached the pres­id­ent’s desk. Once you’ve picked a fil­ter, hit the “play” but­ton at the top left of the page and watch the ma­gic hap­pen (or not).

Each particle rep­res­ents a bill or res­ol­u­tion, and their col­ors cor­res­pond to the party and cham­ber of the le­gis­la­tion, or to its spon­sor. Red in­dic­ates Re­pub­lic­an, blue Demo­crat, and yel­low in­de­pend­ent. Mouse over a dot to see more in­form­a­tion about the bill. Hov­er over the people-shaped mark­ers on the left- and right-hand sides to see names of Con­gress mem­bers, their ideo­logy score, and their state. A handy track­er at the bot­tom of the page tal­lies the num­ber of total bills for a Con­gress at a giv­en point in time.

At the time of this writ­ing, 6,338 bills or res­ol­u­tions have been in­tro­duced dur­ing the 113th Con­gress — 2,151 in the Sen­ate and 4,187 in the House. Eighty-four of them, or about 1 per­cent, have be­come law.

"Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was spotted entering a congressional office building on Tuesday morning for what a committee aide told The Daily Beast was a meeting with the leaders of the House Foreign Affairs committee and relevant staff about his time working in the Trump administration. ... Tillerson’s arrival at the Capitol was handled with extreme secrecy. No media advisories or press releases were sent out announcing his appearance. And he took a little noticed route into the building in order to avoid being seen by members of the media."